One of the problems with fringe history is that there isn’t any quality control. Everything from the potentially interesting to the outright fraudulent all gets dumped into the same fetid pool in which fringe authors swim, splashing slime on one another and yelling to their readers to join them since the water is so fine. The internet is making this problem—already present in book form—that much worse as websites compete for clicks and page views with recycled content or a race to the bottom in launching outrageous claims.

Zakaria Bziker’s Ancient Origins article “The Ancient Civilizations That Came Before” is a good example of the trend. Bziker’ s article is a hodgepodge of old claims glued together with only a vague understanding of the topic at hand. Bziker wants to make the case for advanced civilizations before recorded history, and to do so he relies on dubious assumptions that I am not confident he recognizes as such.

He begins by accepting Plato’s Atlantis dialogues as literally true. He then accepts the work of Ignatius Donnelly as true, and identifies the former Minnesota congressman—who died in 1901—as a “more modern” researcher. He cites Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Worlds Before Our Own, already outdated in its own time, as “recent” research and slaps together claims about the Piri Reis map made by Charles Hapgood in the 1960s with creationist geology from the 1980s to argue for no specific case except that “uniformitarian” science is wrong, and our world should be understood as governed by catastrophes, primus inter pares Noah’s Flood.

But this is nothing more than David Childress or Erich von Däniken do every year or two in their freshly composted and recycled “new” books.

Ralph Ellis is on a plane of his own. Also on Ancient Origins this week the crackpot author of various bizarre claims about Jesus conspiracies has an article adapted from his 1997 book Jesus: Last of the Pharaohs. It begins, unpromisingly, with an assertion that the Epic of Gilgameshis “a Sumerian epic,” displaying the author’s ignorance of its assembly in the Old Babylonian and Neobabylonian periods from a set of independent Sumerian poems. (The version translated in modern editions is a collated version of these texts, with pieces filled in from other sources.) The trouble is that Ellis starts with a few facts and scholarly inferences and then builds them out into a massive contraption extrapolated far beyond the evidence.

Ellis’s main idea is that references to bulls, sheep, and fish in Sumerian (i.e. Mesopotamian), Egyptian, and Hebrew lore prove that all three myth systems are related to each other through the zodiac, in which these animals represent Taurus, Aries, and Pisces. This is rather a silly claim on the face of it, since Aries only became a ram in Greek times, in honor of Jason’s Golden Fleece; the Babylonians identified it as “the Hired Man” or the “Farmhand” in the oldest texts (12th century BCE) before renaming it after the shepherd-king Dumuzi (Tammuz) and/or his ram after 1000 BCE. Since the Epic of Gilgamesh was compiled before the eighteenth century BCE, it would seem a bit difficult to argue that any sheep, rams, or shepherds in the poem were meant to be Aries.

He also quotes from Gilgamesh’s first tablet a passage of the dream vision of Gilgamesh, who dreamed that a star fell from heaven and that it was too heavy for him to lift. Although Gilgamesh’s mother interprets this dream as symbolically referring to the creation by the heavenly gods of his future boon companion Enkidu, and Gilgamesh’s next dream likens Enkidu to a man similar to Gilgamesh whom he embraced like a woman, Ellis concludes that Enkidu is “a stellar object.” (Craig Hines, investigating Nephilim in his 2007 Gateway of the Gods, takes issue with this and calls Enkidu “an important comet.”) Thus, he identifies Gilgamesh as Orion, Enkidu as Sirius or a meteor, and the things they kill—Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven—as the Pleiades and Taurus respectively. He says this is because Humbaba had seven enchantments (or the seven-fold terrors, or however you choose to translate them), representing the seven stars of the Pleiades. Thus, Ellis decides that the whole epic poem is really an account of the precession of the equinoxes and the slow drift of the stars.

This is rather selective reasoning. We might equally apply the Pleiades to the Seven Sages, the seven nights of dreams, the seven goblets of ale, Uruk’s seven gates, the seven years’ worth of wheat, Shamhat’s seven children, the seven floors of the Ark, or any other set of seven found in the Epic. It was a symbolic number, found in too many places to have any one particular meaning here. Worse, Humbaba doesn’t “guard” the Heavenly Bull as Ellis asserts the Pleiades guard Taurus from Orion. That said, the Bull of Heaven was identified with the constellation Taurus, which has been drawn as a bull since before the early Bronze Age. More interestingly, Ian Ridpath proposed in 1988 that the Sumerians envisioned Gilgamesh as Orion, and Taurus as the Bull of Heaven, a concept now widespread in fringe literature that lumps together every great hunter from Heracles to Nimrod as the same guy. However, Ridpath is probably wrong since in the Bronze Age, Orion was Si-zi-an-na, the sky shepherd, to the Babylonians, later identified with Dumuzi (hence Dumuzi-Aries became the ram of Dumuzi instead.) But, if you want to get freaky, there is this: According to Biblical scholar Matthew Black, in ancient Aram, now central Syria, the constellation was named for the Nephilim! (Cf. the Arabic name for Orion, al-Jabbar, the Giant.) But, then again, they also called meteors by the same name, Nephila.

The bigger point is this: The story of Humbaba and that of the Bull of Heaven were separate Sumerian poems, so they can’t be said to represent primordial knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes as Ellis asserts since they were not part of the same narrative at first, and they predate the formalization of the Babylonian zodiac.

With guys like Ellis, I often wonder what the motivation is. To put forward the claim he makes, isn't it necessary to at least do the research so it isn't so obvious he has no grasp of the subject?

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Shane Sullivan

9/25/2015 06:53:04 pm

"Thus, he identifies Gilgamesh as Orion, Enkidu as Sirius or a meteor, and the things they kill—Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven—as the Pleiades and Taurus respectively."

Now I'm afraid Ellis has lost me. At least with the Solar Hero myth you have celestial objects appearing to move through eachother, but how is Orion-Gilgamesh going to kill Pleiades-Humbaba when they're just sitting there in the sky with the Hyades in between them?

>One of the problems with fringe history is that there isn’t any quality control.

Tell me about it. Currently reading Adamski's magnum opus. So far he's spent a chapter regurgitating Charles Fort in table form, and then moved on to asserting that science can't explain how electricity works. Oh, and he is using the Book of Dyzan as primary source material for ancient civilizations.

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Justinian

9/26/2015 05:45:01 am

I hope you will allow me to make a slight correction to your otherwise excellent post.

You mention somewhere the confussion between the Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh and the later Akkadian Epic. It seems that you treat "Akkadian" as an ethnic/linguistic group different from Babylonian. But "Akkadian" is a language (a linguistic family, indeed), while "Old Babylonian" is a period (2000-1600 BC).There are two main points on the topic: the Sumerian tales, although probably coming from a Sumerian oral tradition, were written during the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, when Sumerian was no longer a spoken language (the Neo-Sumerian Ur III kings had Akkadian as their native tongue); the Babylonian epic, composed in Akkadian (in the Old Babylonian literary dialect), was first written in the Old Babylonian period, but its definitive edition comes from nearly 1000 years later, during the Neobabylonian era. The two editions are rather different, the Flood story being present only in the latter.

That the Bull of Heaven is a constellation (perhaps an aethiological myth on its origin) is a common opinion among assyriologists - but I don't know which constellation was actually thought to be. Of course, what this man (Ellis) said is totally nonsense.

Thank you for the clarification, and you are of course right. I know Akkadian is a language and was terribly unclear in referring to the various terms used for the different version of the epic. I've edited the above to be more accurate.

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Einheit Elf

12/22/2015 05:52:05 am

I know I am commenting to this a bit late, but according to Charles Pope's blog (which in itself is an bundle of misinformation and "interesting theories about Egypt" mostly, and deserves to be Colavitized) in Daily Grail, Mr. Ellis is working on a new book about "King Arthur and the Grail". Lord, or insert your favourite deity here, help us all.

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